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About Penelope Fitzgerald

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW’ S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEARA Best Book of the Year: San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle TimesWinner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography

Penelope Fitzgerald, one of the most quietly brilliant novelists of the twentieth century, was a great English writer whose career didn’t begin until she was nearly sixty. Her life was marked by dramatic twists of fate, moving from a bishop’s palace to a sinking houseboat to a last, late blaze of renown. Her exquisite novels—short, spare masterpieces—would go on to win some of the most coveted awards in literature: the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Now, in an impeccable match of talent between biographer and subject, Hermione Lee gives us this remarkable writer’s story.

About Penelope Fitzgerald

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW’ S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEARA Best Book of the Year: San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle TimesWinner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography

The acclaimed biographer of Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf gives us an intimate portrait of one of the most quietly brilliant novelists of the twentieth century.

Penelope Fitzgerald was a great English writer whose career didn’t begin until she was nearly sixty. She would go on to win some of the most coveted awards in literature—the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Now, in an impeccable match of talent between biographer and subject, Hermione Lee, a master biographer and one of Fitzgerald’s greatest champions, gives us this remarkable writer’s story. Lee’s critical expertise is on dazzling display on every page, as it illuminates this extraordinary English life. Fitzgerald, born into an accomplished intellectual family, the granddaughter of two bishops, led a life marked by dramatic twists of fate, moving from a bishop’s palace to a sinking houseboat to a last, late blaze of renown. We see Fitzgerald’s very English childhood in the village of Hampstead; her Oxford years, when she was known as the “blonde bombshell”; her impoverished adulthood as a struggling wife, mother and schoolteacher, raising a family in difficult circumstances; and the long-delayed start to her literary career.

Fitzgerald’s early novels draw on her own experiences—working at the BBC in wartime, at a bookshop in Suffolk, at an eccentric stage school in the 1960s—while her later books open out into historical worlds that she, magically, seems to entirely possess: Russia before the Revolution, postwar Italy, Germany in the time of the Romantic writer Novalis. Fitzgerald’s novels are short, spare masterpieces, and Hermione Lee unfurls them here as works of genius. Expertly researched, written out of love and admiration for this wonderful author’s work, Penelope Fitzgerald is literary biography at its finest—an unforgettable story of lateness, persistence and survival.

About Hermione Lee

Hermione Lee is a biographer, critic, teacher of literature, and president of Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Among her many works are literary biographies of Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, and Penelope Fitzgerald, which won the James Tait… More about Hermione Lee

About Hermione Lee

Hermione Lee is a biographer, critic, teacher of literature, and president of Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Among her many works are literary biographies of Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, and Penelope Fitzgerald, which won the James Tait… More about Hermione Lee

“A championing critical biography. . . . Richly illuminating. . . . It is, very movingly, a picture of a whole past life . . . with a reverence for her subject that is felt on every page.” —The New York Review of Books

“Rarely has a literary biography been more needed or necessary than in Fitzgerald’s case. . . . She was a writer of genius. . . . [Lee’s] research is meticulous. . . . Her conclusion is a statement of biographical honesty.” —The Wall Street Journal

“The life and times of that elusive, original miracle worker, the English novelist and biographer Penelope Fitzgerald, have been brilliantly captured by Lee. . . . [Fitzgerald’s] fiction, when it finally emerged, had a tamped-down force and intense compression, as if the decades-long wait had worked its own clarifying, crystallizing magic.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A captivating read about a woman who lived most of her life on the sidelines. . . . With great respect, and an innate sense of the underappreciated, Lee shines a brilliant light on Fitzgerald’s long life of making do, and making art in the process.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Brilliant . . . Lee catches not only the tempo of each decade, but how values from Fitzgerald’s past constantly inform her present.” —Financial Times

“Hermione Lee’s sensitive, respectful biography traces the life of a woman as elusive and enigmatic as her fiction. . . . Moving. . . . Mak[es] palpable the weight of experience Fitzgerald transmuted into fiction of such remarkable grace and deceptive ease.” —Newsday

“Gloriously illuminates the separate talents of two distinguished ladies of letters.” —The Economist